For my professional project I was lucky enough to work on AUCB’s Mid Summers Night Dream. I really enjoyed working with such a talent production team and group of actors. I worked with Hannah Feeney and our job was to create the visuals that would be projected onto a large frame. I have always wanted to have a go at working with a live performance and when I saw an email from Ken Robertson asking if any of my courses students wanted to be apart of it I jumped at the chance.

When I first started this project I made myself goals to follow to help me improve myself. I wanted to become more organized, as my time keeping skills have been my weakness in the past. I started off my project after my first meeting with ken and Ollie making a time plan to help me remember dates of meeting and keep me on track. I also started my research early, back in November, as I really wanted to do well in my work and impress the production team. Me and Hannah attended regular meetings with different drafts of each projection to see how we could improve them to ken and Ollie’s opinion. We attended meetings right up to the week of the performance.

When I started this project I though they only wanted us to create the productions but in our forth meeting with Ken he asked us if me and Hannah could be there on the night to manually control each projections, of course I didn’t mind and actually really wanted to but I did get really nervous as I think it is a big responsibility and didn’t want to mess it up. We used Modul8 to help project the images and videos. Modul8 was a completely new program to me and Hannah but I enjoy a challenge and love to learn new software. We both downloaded a demo of the program and had a go at doing some tutorials. Elliot kindly showed us how to use if properly for what we want and gave us a tutorial on the basics.

The only problems I had on my professional project was to do with the equipment. Usually I have had no problem getting hold of the right equipment for the projects I have done but me and Hannah did come across I lot of set backs with the equipment. It all started when we went to book to VJ Laptops out. We made sure we booked them a lot in advance so we gave in two months notice. The first time we tried booking it the computer got funny because it was over a weekend. We went to Jordan and he was extremely helpful and did everything he could. In the end we got one laptop booked but unfortunately a third year student wanted the other one for a final project. Jordan sorted it out that we could take one of the Mac desktops instead. After sorting the problem with the computers we had to decide what projectors to use. The trouble with and stage performance is there is a lot of lighting and after testing we realized we needed a bright projectors so it didn’t get washed out with the lighting. We were told that IT had two projectors bright enough for what we wanted, so I asked them that day if we could have them. They replied saying that they only had one and they didn’t want us taking any projectors off site at all. After finding that out I got in contact with John who was in charge of all the technical equipment and he sorted it so we could hire them off a separate company we just needed to book out the adapters to the projectors. We booked them out with the help of Jordan and we thought we were sorted. We were fine until we got to the week of the performance and in testing the adapters were completely broke and didn’t work at all , in the end we bought two new ones from the apple store and used them. Also in the last dress rehearsal the VJ laptop kept overheating the movies kept freezing. In the end to solve the problem we borrowed another Mac Desktop from the university and used that instead of the laptop.

Overall my experience doing this project has been very rewarding and I have learnt loads of new skills. I really liked being apart of this performance because I felt everyone had there own creative input. I also felt me and Hannah worked really well as a team and even though I live 2 hours away we still was always in contact and meeting up regularly to finish the work. I have enjoyed working on this live performance so much that I will be looking into doing it again in the future.

In total we have attended 4 production meetings. unfortunately due to having an important hospital appointment I could rearrange I had to miss the first one. Hannah explained everything which happened and i did apologize to Ken, Ollie and John. On one of the meetings they gave us a technical schedule for the week of the performance. shown below;